The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was up at a farm on the North End recently and a couple of us homesteaders got to swapping chicken stories.  Roosters, mostly.    You think maybe chickens are silly little cacklers scratching up worms and grubs for dinner or they’re benign little birds dropping eggs for your breakfast, you haven’t been properly introduced to the male of the species.

Maybe you’ve heard the expression Cock of the Walk?  That’s these bad boys.  Vicious attackers of the unwary.  Aggressive, fearless birds that come at you with beak and spurs.  They’ll open you up before you can say chicken cacciatore.  And you’ll never turn your back on one again, trust me.

Well, we swapped a few whoppers before Professor Bob mentioned he’d been up to Darrington for the cockfights awhile back, a couple hundred Tarheels betting their moonshine earnings on birds bred for vicious violence.  When I first came to Camano Island, the cops were busy busting cockfighting rings in Stanwood and Gomorrah.  I know what you’re thinking: didn’t this sort of bloodsport die out in the 1800’s?  And the answer is apparently NO.  Down south where I grew up, they fight dogs in Dixie.  Yeah, it seems barbaric.  But … we still got boxing and now we got kickboxing.  And if you want mayhem, tune in some Sunday to NFL football.  They’ll study us someday like we were Romans, professional gladiators.  Only real difference is we figured how to make it profitable.

Maybe the cockfighters need to sell television rights. Line up some advertisers.  Sell beer and hotdogs.  Make it respectable for more than the Tarheels and a few UW professors.  On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t generate a mass audience.  After all, we got politics now 24/7 if you like your violence vicious.  Course, maybe they should sell beer and peanuts and advertising rights.    Monday Night Congressional Cockfights.  Probably take a few months to balance the budget with the profits.  Think about it is all I’m asking.

My buddy Sam lives in a dilapidated house down by the newly opened Katmandu Kite Shop and no, it isn’t a kite store, it’s a recreational marijuana outlet.  Sam’s place is back in the nettled interior, down a dead end dirt road near the old trout pond that once held trout but got dredged back in the early ‘80’s on one debauched weekend that ended my trout fishing on the South End.

Sam’s been living the bachelor life since his wife left him.  She’d grown weary of the power being turned off for non-payment and the back taxes on the place reaching critical mass and since neither of them were willing to work, they played ‘chicken’ with each other, hoping the other would swerve first back into the job market.  No way was Sam going back to wage slavery so ultimately Bobbie packed her things, left a short and not-so-sweet note and headed back down to an old boyfriend in Eugene, Oregon who at least worked part-time driving schoolbus.

Sam says he never saw it coming.  I believe him, not because all the signs weren’t pointing inexorably toward a dissolution, but because Sam doesn’t have peripheral vision.  He would have to hit a sign head-on.  In fact, he didn’t find Bobbie’s kiss-off letter until four days after she left.  Which isn’t as myopic as you might think.  Sam  is a Hoarder.  His house is like one of those ant farms I had as a kid, nothing but tunnels, stuff stacked along the paths head high, trails leading to the bed or the bathroom or through the kitchen to the stove on one side, the fridge down a different path.

Bobbie kept the piles slightly more passable, but now that she’s gone, the tunnels have narrowed.  Nothing much gets thrown away, but stuff apparently is coming in constantly, at least by my observation after not seeing Sam for a few months.  The folks who dreamed up ‘planned obsolescence’ never counted on the Sams who keep the broken crap and live in their own midden.  Another year, I figure he’ll run out of room completely.  I don’t know how many Sams are out there, but I have to wonder if this isn’t why Sears, after a century, is going broke.

There is something seriously discordant about President-in-Exile Trump going to the conservative Christian Faith and Freedom Coalition to rail about the con artists running the Jan. 6^th hearings.  Me and Don both listened to them, but we heard differently the testimony regarding how Pence and his advisors prayed together before coming to the Capitol, then read their Bibles (which they apparently carry) to find strength and solace during the assault on the chambers.  Don Sr. had cursed Pence earlier, calling him a wimp and a pussy, but he felt no embarrassment addressing the evangelical right to denounce his Vice President, one of their own faith but maybe not their own freedom, whatever the moniker means to them.  Honestly, I’m boggled by the disconnect.  One man is fervently religious, the other is fervently not.  Can’t these yahoos tell the difference???

Well, as one who is more than a bit distrustful of religion, all religions, it only confirms my prejudice.  I would want my church or synagogue or mosque to be able to recognize a phony, a sinner, a man without scruples or morals or the sense god gave a donkey, as the charlatan he is.  But no, apparently that is a bridge too far for them.  He gave them a Supreme Court that will soon outlaw abortions and protect us citizens’ right to own and carry military assault weapons.  And hopefully they think that Court will rule that religion and government can mix all it wants.  So long as it’s the Christian religion, at least theirs.

In his speech to the assembled holy, he testified that he would, if elected Fuhrer once more, pardon those patriots who were convicted of rioting in the Capitol.  The man is nothing if not an unrepentant criminal.  Of course he would pardon these insurrectionists, they were there to do his bidding.  He’ll pardon all the crooks, probably give them a job in his White House staff.  If Rudy Giuliani could be his attorney without embarrassment, bring on LaPierre from the NRA to be his Attorney General.  The hogs are at the trough, dinner is served.

I remember watching the Watergate hearings pretty much every day back in the heydays of Nixon and his happy crew of ‘plumbers’.  Riveting stuff on my small TV.  An entire nation watched the hearings and when the secret tape recordings Tricky Dick kept under his desk came to light, well, this was more entertaining than any prime time cliff hanger mystery.  Times change, I guess, and now the Congressional hearings to determine the culpability of Donald J. Trump’s role in instigating the riots of January 6^th are only watched by about a quarter of the public and only a quarter of us even follow the proceedings at all.

I guess we’re more interested in the Kardashians than what is looking more and more like a planned coup by the President to stay in power at any cost.  A coup, I would argue, that is still ongoing what with the Prez-in-Exile campaigning for MAGATS from sea to rising sea.  He’s raised 250 million dollars to stop the steal but mostly he’s raised 250 million dollars for Donald Trump.  There is no PAC for a Stop the Steal.  The man is nothing if not the world’s greatest con artist. And apparently there are plenty of suckers who would vote for him one more time.

A new poll today found that more than half of Republicans and more than half of Democrats think America will ‘cease to be a democracy’ in the future.  Happy days for Trump supporters, not so much for the rest of us.  But hey, why bother watching those Congressional hearings when the country is probably going down the toilet anyway?  So what if they can prove that Trump was actively promoting the insurrection?  Maybe he really thought the election was stolen.  Maybe he’s not a conspirator himself, just a deluded greedy narcissistic opportunist, mostly crazy but not culpable by reason of insanity.

I don’t know if the country will survive this treasonous monster.  I doubt the Dep’t. of Justice will bring charges to an ex-or exiled-President.  No man is above  the law, we keep hearing, but some men simply change the laws.

I thought I’d seen the bottom of the political pickle barrel with Nixon and the Watergate revelations, a President and his henchmen breaking into the opposition’s headquarters, then covering it up.  Nixon, crook that he was, was shamed into leaving office before he was impeached and convicted.  Eventually even the GOP cut him loose, convincing him he could go out on two feet or be dragged out by his nose.  Tricky Dick didn’t need a Weatherman to see which way the hurricane was blowing.

The January 6 hearings are slowly unraveling the plot to overturn the government, something Nixon would never have considered.  He just wanted to use dirty tricks to win, not conspire in a coup and a takeover.  Donald J. Trump is no Nixon.  Donald J. Trump is a criminal.  Piece by piece, the witch hunters have found their sorceress and uncovered his evil scheme.  When he heard that the mob he directed toward the Capitol was threatening to hang Mike Pence, he merely shrugged, suggesting that maybe that was what his VP deserved.  Ponder that a minute or 60.  The President of the United States unconcerned that a riotous mob might actually lynch Mike Pence, Vice President.  Maybe exactly what he deserved.  Roll that around on your tongue awhile.  Then consider what he told his second in command a few hours earlier, that he was weak, he was a wimp, he was a pussy.  Probably hanging was what he deserved.

Imagine for another minute or more the What If.  What if the mob had actually gotten hold of Mike the Wimp and hauled him out to the gallows, hoisted him up to the noose and with dozens of televison cameras and GoPros and countless cellphone videos recording the murder, hung him by his neck for America to watch.  Would half of us have agreed with his boss, the guy who wouldn’t declare Trump the winner of the election he’d lost, that he had it coming?  I suspect a lot of folks would have declared justice served.  That, I think, is the America we have become.  Those rioters in the Capitol building might well be the true face of a goodly portion of this country.

The question I have is this:  who are the real witch hunters?

Most of us red blooded freedom loving Americans hate to take a vacation, not because we are fun-averse, but because when we come back to the Job, we have to work doubly hard to catch up with all the unfinished bizness we left behind.  I should know, having just returned from a three week road trip cross country to find all the backlog waiting open jawed.  For the purpose of this lament, I’m going to skip the saga of the broken drain in the kitchen sink I’m still trying to repair.  You’ve heard enough plumbing nightmares from me to last a Maytag repairman’s lifetime.  Instead I’m going to focus on my little park across the island and the mudhole I left behind.

If you’ve missed the previous bitching about my county park guy telling me he was going to put my request at the bottom of his To-Do list because I’d complained that after two or more years I was sick and tired of my parking lot that was a complete mudhole hell after any rains, well, count yourself lucky.  Me, I just pretty much figured that car swallowing tarpit would have to stay the same, an invitation to vandals that nobody cared about this little pocket park so go ahead and trash the place.  But … to my surprise, I got a photo on the trip from a neighbor showing gravel had been spread over the parking lot, not really evenly or tamped down, but hellfire, better than tire-sucking mud any day of the week.

Turns out, though, someone, probably the county, had dumped the gravel and a good Samaritan neighbor got tired of looking at the little mountain of it so he drove his tractor down and spread the stuff.  All fine and dandy, you might think, but I think maybe the county might have planned to even out the craters, spread the thicker gravel next, then add the 5/8ths minus stuff on top, kind of a professional job.  Oh well, another South End attempt at do-it-yourself gone awry, which reminds me, I got that drain to fix later today.

Needless to say I’m waiting for the county to contact me now that I’m back, tanned and rested from our trip back east.  I’m expecting a pretty pissed off county guy to call any day now.  Course, I’m not answering phones.  And in the future I expect I won’t just get put at the bottom of the To-Do list, I’ll be on my own from here on out.  Sometimes you just can’t catch a break.  And you probably shouldn’t take vacations….

Starving Artist

When I was really poor and competing for public art projects, I would have to go to various states for finalist presentations, usually competing with 3-5 other poor saps hoping for the same lousy commission.  Once, on a project in Portland, Oregon, my arts commissioner recommended a ‘reasonable’ downtown hotel for me to stay at, probably 3 times what I’d ever spent on accommodations.  I told her, gee thanks, but I’ll find something more in my price range and she replied, “I don’t want you sleeping in your truck.”  I assured her I wouldn’t.

What I found, 20 or 30 miles outside Portland, was a $23 a night hellhole in Vancouver, Washington, a motel where, if you wanted a TV was $5 more.  If you wanted a shower, $5 more.  If you wanted a key, yeah, you guessed it.  I chose the basic plan, slid 23 bucks under the bullet proof glass in the stainless steel bowl below and took occupancy of my suite.  My neighbors, judging by the water bowls and dog dishes outside their doors, were long termers, Lifers, I’d have to say, one step away from homeless or sleeping in their cars, running or not.  The residents I met weren’t looking for hellos or companionship or even a drinking buddy.  They were folks who wanted to be left the hell alone.  Misery, by the way, does NOT love company.

I have stayed in plenty of fleabag flophouses in my day, none as cheap as this dive, but unlike the others, my life wasn’t threatened by surly neighbors on the great escalator down at this one the way it has been at some of the others.  When folks reach rock bottom, I guess aggression is one of those virtues they abandon along with hope.

In case you’re interested, I did not win the commission for the Portland Health Clinic even though I offered them a serious amount of glass for the project.  I lost to a person even my art liaison at the Washington Art Commission disdainfully characterized as ‘no artist.’  So I was out 23 smackers plus tax.  Gas, food and a helluva lot of pride.  I swore next finalist presentation, no matter what state, what country, whatever, I would just sleep in my truck at the nearest rest area.  You want to be an artist, forget about the Ritz.  Or even Motel 6 ….

So three of us yahoos decided it was High Time to go over to Pt. Townsend on the Peninsula and attend the Wooden Boat Festival there, us being South End boat builders and all. We had a 12 foot Pelican sailboat, plenty sound enough for the shipping channels of the Straits, we figured, so provisioned with a box of donuts, we set off in the fog. We could hear the container ships booming past but couldn’t see them — and worse, I’m sure they couldn’t see us either, even with radar. The Trident nuclear sub surfaced close by, way close enough to see, an evil black fish that no doubt hadn’t picked us up as anything more than flotsam.

By afternoon the sun had broken through and we found ourselves near the lighthouse of what we thought was Fort Worden, just outside Pt. Townsend, so we sailed south and came upon another lighthouse and now we realized we’d mistaken our location so we continued sailing around Indian and Marrowstone Islands well into the afternoon and finally arrived at Pt. Townsend way late. With a return trip yet to come …. And the fog threatening to descend again.

We ditched the boat on the beach and hoofed into the marina. Whereupon we come upon a Pelican in the show, the homeliest boat moored up, so naturally I asked what the hell kind of duck is this thing you got berthed?? Which prompted a lively response from its proud owners and after they’d settled down a bit, I asked what was it they liked about an ugly scow like this? The water was frothing at near boil but one of the sailorboys said, “I’ll tell you what’s great about a Pelican. It can’t be sunk!”

“Can’t be sunk?” I howled. “Can’t be sunk?? Really?” And he proceeded to tell the tale of a Pelican that had capsized the last summer off the coast of Lummi Island in a storm and when help arrived, two men were rowing it while it was completely full of water! Captain Larry was practically dancing a jig on the dock pointing at me and smirking. “That was him! He flipped his boat up there last year. It’s him. It’s him!!”

“Will you pipe down a minute,” I commanded, realizing my fun with these buccaneers was over and we were embarked on different seas of mirth. “What color was the boat? Where exactly? How’d they get to shore?” To which they pretty accurately recounted my sad little nautical escape that previous summer and so I fessed up. “But,” I said, “we basically sunk. We were completely under water. More flotation under the decks,” I advised. “And a motor that won’t drag the transom down like mine did.”

Well, it’s a small world apparently, and we might have stayed for some partying and sea shanties and late night sailor lies, but the fog had returned and we still had to head back out into the shipping lanes. We went to the marina store for supplies, ascertained we had $8 between all three of us and now, a Hard Decision needed to be made. Should we buy a navigational chart? A compass? Something to eat? $8 leaves not a whole lot of options.

Being the Salty Dogs we were, we made the Hard Choice, the one a less experienced crew might eschew, the one not in the Sailor’s Manual. We grabbed a 6 pack of beer and sailed into the sunset — well, if the fog hadn’t blotted it out —three mariners moving darkly into wooden boat mythology, fearless as idiots in a dangerous dream, never to be seen in Pt. Townsend again. No doubt they recount that voyage yearly at the Festival. “Aye, the lads are out there still,” they whisper in hushed voices around the beach campfires, “ sailing in the boat that cannot sink. God rest their souls….”

This month the South End is opening its first pot shops since we legalized marijuana last year. It’s been the Hot Topic at the Diner, almost as polarizing as global warming and Affordable Health Care, two topics Anita, the current owner, has turned into gold by changing her menu to include Obama Omelettes and Polar Bear Burgers. No doubt we’ll be seeing Killer Kannabis Hot Wings and other items shortly. The Diner is a regular debating society most breakfasts and lunches. At least indigestion isn’t blamed on Big Larry’s cooking.

Marijuana hasn’t exactly been a scarce commodity down here, legal or not, although if you listened to Charlie Griper’s apoplectic rants that legalizing the stuff will lead society inexorably down the toilet, you’d think liberals had just cloned a few plants from terrorist pals in Afghanistan and smuggled them onto the island. “How you gonna keep it out of the kids’ hands when we let dopeheads sell the stuff right up north? Might as well hand it out in the high school cafeteria!”

Harley Bob laughs. “Charlie, trust me, they won’t buy it at the Bud Hut — they’ll get if for half the price where they get it now. It’s not like buying rotgut moonshine when you can pay more for something that doesn’t blind you and tastes like turpentine strained through a dirty sock.”

“What are you talking about, Bob? We just told em it’s okay to fry their heads when we legalized it. We classified it as one of the most dangerous drugs out there as long as I lived. Now we’re spozed to think it’s okay. Like taking an aspirin. Jeez, gimme a break.”

“I guess you put too much trust in the government, Charles,” Bob laughs, knowing Charlie’s a card carrying anti-government Tea Party member. Charlie practically gags on his cheese Glacier Melt, a meal vaguely reminiscent of those Here’s your brain on drugs commercials a few years back.

“Laugh all you want, Bob. You’d laugh if they legalized heroin.” Bob taps his empty coffee cup for a refill. “Hit me again, Brenda,” he calls over to our morning waitress. “And hold the meth this time.”

Yes, it’s a New Day down at the South End.

Recreational Crabbing in the 21st Century

It’s crabbing season once more, diminished now to a two month opening, five days a week. Ordinarily I walk the eelgrass jungles for the vicious beasts, but when the tides aren’t low, I do what the rest of us down here on the South End do, I use a boat and set pots baited with delicacies from Trader Joe or catered in by Brenda’s Catering and Chow. Everyone these days uses motorboats, but I’m still rowing my little aluminum scow, the one with my homemade oars. Because the State, in its scientific wisdom, requires pots to be pulled the fifth day, I had to row out for mine in whitecaps. Believe me, you pay attention to every stroke when waves are bashing the sides of your tiny tub.

I did okay going out, then managed to pull both pots without flipping the boat. I should maybe mention I’m about 400 yards, call it a quarter mile, out from shore in 75 feet of water. Nobody’s around and nobody’s going to call 911 if I go overboard. I have a lifejacket worst case…. I should probably carry life insurance too.

Going back, though, was harder. The wind had picked up and I was taking worse waves on the sides. My pots were cramping me up for rowing and the direction of the wind was anything but where I wanted to go. Sure, I thought to myself, a smarter man would’ve never come out today. A man with minimal brains would’ve turned around halfway out when the rowing became hard and the danger apparent. Even a dummy might’ve figured leave the damn pots and get his sorry butt back to shore. But … I’m a South Ender and by god, I was going to get those pots and whatever crabs they held even if it meant I had to risk life and limb. This is what differentiates a salty dog from a landlubber professor of economics, in case you were wondering.

Halfway back my left oar caught a wave and hung up a moment. When I got straightened out, I noticed a nut had fallen off the oarlock and next thing I knew the whole gizmo that attached to the oar was coming apart and sure enough, it did. I tried to find the nut down in the crab blood and bait water, but it was nowhere to be seen and last thing I wanted to do was get down and start a panicked search so a rogue wave could swamp me. Gordon Lightfoot said it maybe best in the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: Where in the world does the love of God go, when the minutes turn to hours?

All I know is I cursed myself for not tightening those bolts up good and tight. Nobody to blame but one sad sorry soon-to-be-saltier dog. Worst case, I’d be blown up to the state park at the point, five miles north, not drowned at least. I had crab so I had food. Raw, but survival skills demand a bit of compromise. Sure, I was a little wet, but not hypothermic. And … I still had that oar.

So I paddled one side, rowed the other. I don’t recommend this method, but in a pinch, I can testify, it works. From shore I’m sure it looks like a drunk with one bad arm, every stroke turning the boat about 45 degrees, the waves smacking it, then a paddle turning it back the other way. I finally washed up on the beach not too far from my original launch site.

Some call this recreational crabbing. Even on the South End, this hardly qualifies for recreation. All I know, those crabs are going to taste real good tonight.